Riot Baby

[psocoptera]

Riot Baby, Tochi Onyebuchi. Had some good moments but didn't really click for me - for personal-context reasons* I have a hard time taking gang stories seriously, which wasn't the whole book but was significant early on, and I didn't have much of a sense of where it was going, and there was something about the style that felt very New Wave to me in a way I wasn't entirely into. (Can I still say New Wave about people writing fifty years later? I mean in terms of the fluid structure, the way the transitions flowed, I don't know.) Had an interesting moment at the end when I got to the bio and discovered that Onyebuchi is a dude - I don't like to think that gender is such a strong lens in how I read things, but it obviously is, because it was this instant reevaluation of which of the two siblings was meant to be the "main character"/who the author probably identified with/whose story was being told. An interesting experience. (I'm not sure now whether I subconsciously assume that all sff authors with names I don't automatically gender are women, or that specifically Black or African sff authors are women, or that people with names ending in vowels are women - multiple possible layers of sexism and racism here. So much to try to clean out of one's brain.)

(*I grew up a middle-class white kid in SoCal at a time when adults were Very Worried about Gang Activity, so that for instance my junior high had a bunch of dress-code rules trying to stop people from wearing colors. Which might have been a legitimate concern for kids who weren't in our little magnet-program bubble! I don't even know! But for me at the time resulted in me coming to view Gang Education in somewhat the same light as DARE, as a concern that was overblown, and it's hard to shake that, even though intellectually I know that kids actually died.)